Choosing our friends

Your front-page headline (90% of whites have few or no black friends, July 20) is a cause for serious concern. Friendships provide the informal context in which we learn more about each other. Such dialogue ultimately promotes better understanding between white and minority ethnic groups; and leads not only to greater empathy, as your article rightly points out, but to greater trust between groups.

So what will be the source of the glue that will hold our communities together? The answer seems to lie in the places where people from different ethnic groups work together, go to school together, and worship together. These are the environments where dialogue should take place. There is much evidence that these are places where institutional racism lives - but there is no alternative route for building integrated communities. Delbert Sandiford St Albans, Herts

We don't make friends at random. Our friends are mostly drawn from the people we are in frequent contact with through an existing social network and who share our personal interests. There is strong bias in ordinary social mechanisms against the randomised friendship that appears to be the Commission for Racial Equality's ideal model. Would we be shocked to learn that "90% of working-class people have no middle-class friends"?

If it is really true, then the conclusion of the survey that 46% of white people have at least one close black or Asian friend is the surprise, and an indication that Britain is actually a very relaxed multicultural society. Guy Herbert London

I used to live in a village in Cornwall, where the ethnic minority community consisted of one mixed-race woman. There is no doubt that there was a great deal of racism in the village, but there was also very little opportunity for stereotypes to be put to rest. I now live a mile from the centre of Birmingham. We have our racist minority, but most people have perfectly normal relationships with their neighbours, wherever they come from.

There is no doubt that there is a minority of white people who choose not to know people from the ethnic minorities; there are also very large numbers who have little or no opportunity to do so. Ignorance is not always deliberate; there is a very large issue around educating people living in all-white areas, which is not being brought out effectively, perhaps because racism is persistently addressed on the level of the individual, rather than that of society as a whole.Robert Brenchley Birmingham

Your article betrays an ignorance of statistics and, dare I say it, an urban bias. The facts are that less than 8% of the UK population is from an ethnic minority background; most of these people live in urban areas; and that they tend to be concentrated even within these areas. In large parts of the UK there are very few people from ethnic minorities.

It is therefore hardly surprising that many people from European backgrounds have relatively few friends of African and Asian heritage (the terms "black" and "white" are particularly unhelpful here). I suspect that where people from different cultures mix (certainly in Brixton where I lived for many years) their friendship patterns will contradict the misleading and profoundly negative analysis in the survey and your report of it.John Kanefsky Devon